Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable

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Essential climate variables (ECVs) are used to track critical attributes of atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial systems over time scales appropriate for analyzing their relationships with climate change. As part of a larger Climate Data Record (CDR) and ECV Development project, scientists at the USGS Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center in Denver, Colorado, have led the development and validation of the Burned Area ECV algorithm. This algorithm identifies burned areas in Landsat imagery, which has a spatial resolution of 30 m and a temporal resolution of 16 days or more, depending on cloud cover. Fires are frequently unreported; consequently, existing fire databases are often incomplete. Furthermore, these databases often have location errors, and records may be duplicated. The Burned Area ECV products provide new and unique information about spatial and temporal patterns of fire occurrence that existing fire databases may lack, especially in areas such as the shrub and grassland ecosystems in the Great Plains and in the western and southeastern United States.

Validation protocols have been established incorporating and adapting the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Land Product Validation (LPV) Subgroup's best practice guidelines in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative ECV Fire Disturbance (Fire_cci) validation team. Collection of validation data from both high-resolution commercial satellites and Landsat has been completed for a number of Landsat path/row scenes in the United States; the data have been used to quantitatively assess the accuracy of the Burned Area ECV and to identify areas for improvement in future algorithm versions.

Visit http://remotesensing.usgs.gov/ecv/BA_overview.php for more information about the Burned Area ECV.

The Burned Area ECV data are available at: https://doi.org/10.5066/F73B5X76

http://remotesensing.usgs.gov/ecv/BA_overview.php

Map of areas burned from 1984–2015 (A) and barchart of annual area burned (B) from the Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable for the conterminous U.S.

Map of areas burned from 1984–2015 (A) and barchart of annual area burned (B) from the Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable for the conterminous U.S.

 

Platform
Author Name
Todd Hawbaker
Author Email
tjhawbaker@usgs.gov